Vail Resorts Discounts 2026-27 Epic Pass for Skiers Aged 13-30
We will continue to make it cheaper until it's better
Vail Resorts’ released 2026-27 Epic Pass prices and details this morning. The pass suite, resort menu, and blackout structures remain unchanged from previous winters. While overall prices tick up slightly (an average of less than four percent over 2025-26 rates), Vail introduces a discounted tier for 13- to 30-year-olds on the full Epic and Epic Local passes:
Epic Day Passes remain available in two age brackets along six tiers, in increments of one to seven days:
Unlike the discounted Epic Military and Adaptive passes, which only access Vail-owned ski areas, the discounted youth passes are full Epic Passes with partner resort benefits. Here’s the full 2026-27 Epic Pass roster:
Vail is framing its youth discounts as “a major step to shape the future of skiing and snowboarding.” The initiative complements last year’s Epic Friends rollout – which simplified passholder buddy discounts with half-off-any-day lift tickets – and a reinvigorated Turn In Your Ticket program that allows skiers to roll up to $175 of that expense into a down payment for next winter’s Epic Pass.
The intermediary age tiers better position the Epic Pass against its national and regional competitors, which have long offered various teen and young adult passes (Vail has actually offered teen tiers on some of its regional passes for years). Here’s a sampling of the competition’s offerings (prices highlighted in yellow are 2025-26 early-bird rates):
The youth discounts echo and build upon Vail’s habit of targeting hungry but underserved ski markets. Past efforts have including hugely discounted “local” passes for Tahoe, Summit County, and the Northeast; a six-tiered, one- to seven-day build-your-own-pass product (Epic Day); and the 2018 rollout of Military Epic for active-duty and retired members of the armed forces.
Focusing on youth – meaning, in this case, broke-ass twenty-somethings and teenagers – is consistent with the “Epic for Everyone” philosophy that has animated Vail’s public narrative since the company sliced 20 percent off Epic Pass prices ahead of the 2021-22 ski season.
“Our immediate priority is increasing guest visitation to our resorts,” Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said in September’s end-of-year earnings report. Understandable: Epic Pass unit sales and skier visits at Vail-owned properties had both declined for two consecutive years, even as the overall ski industry rebounded from a poor 2023-24 winter with a 1.7 percent uptick in skier visits and the second-best season on record.
These declines likely doomed former CEO Kirsten Lynch, who took over for Katz in 2021 and vanished into skiing’s Bermuda Triangle in May. Katz, who’d transformed Vail from a regional operator into the largest ski company on the planet in roughly a decade and a half, suddenly returned, poised, it seemed, to do the same thing all over again.
“I also understand that there’s a narrative that the industry is mature, that there are not many strategies left to drive growth in our company,” he said shortly after his return. “It’s important to remember that that is exactly the same narrative I walked into when I became CEO in 2006.”
Unfortunately, Mother Nature declined to cooperate with Vail’s comeback. Through Jan. 4, Vail Resorts’ North American skier visits had declined 20 percent year-over-year, mostly due to historically low snowpack across the West.
But this winter has never concerned me as a long-term indicator of Vail’s trajectory or potential. Vail’s aggressive lift ticket discounting, both with Epic Friends tickets and a 30 percent cut in advanced purchases, signaled the company’s return to the more inventive thinking that had defined Katz’s first, industry-redefining tenure as CEO. This targeted discount on youth passes could pair nicely with Turn In Your Ticket credits to set Vail back toward pass and skier growth (a 20-year-old with a full $175 Turn In Your Ticket credit could rack an Epic Pass for $694 or an Epic Local for $474).
Or, this sort of mass discounting could reignite the catalyst that (arguably) stoked Vail’s Epic Pass and attendance declines to begin with: drawing more skiers via creative promotions without protecting the periods during which the mountains already have more skiers than they can manage. The 2021 discounts pushed Epic unit sales up to Mars, but corresponded with an unexpected labor shortage that disrupted operations across the portfolio and probably contributed – after the snow-fueled 2022-23 attendance bonanza – to some consumers, empowered by an increasingly competitive national pass market, to drift toward competing products.
I had hoped for a larger reset of the Epic Pass suite that nudged the topline unlimited pass price higher while greasing off-peak access and broadening the destination menu. “We will be evaluating all aspects of our pass portfolio, including the product offerings, pricing, and benefits…” for fiscal 2027 (which starts in September 2026), Katz said last year. I’ve advocated for, among other changes, tighter holiday access at always-busy resorts like Okemo and Breckenridge, a no-Saturdays pass, and the addition of more owned and partner mountains to better spread all these new Epic Pass holders around.
Not this year. Which is not to say never. Katz, in his first year back, has moved boldly but not impulsively. The step-by-step discounting approach simultaneously signals a willingness to experiment and a commitment to volume-as-primary-growth-driver.
Let’s take a deeper look at Epic’s 2026-27 pass suite, what it means for skiers and skiing, and how Vail could build on this to complete its pivot back from trying-to-catch-up-to-its-old-self to industry disrupter.